Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Curiosity NAV RIGHT B image acquired on Sol 2544, October 2, 2019.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has just started Sol 2546 duties.

Reports Roger Wiens, a geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Curiosity is going through its list of analysis details that take place after taking a drill sample.

Curiosity Mast Camera Left photo taken on Sol 2543, October 2, 2019.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

A recent main activity by the Mars machinery is a SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) gas chromatograph column clean-up.

Curiosity NAV RIGHT B image acquired on Sol 2544, October 2, 2019.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Remote-sensing data

Meanwhile, there has been time to take environmental observations and more remote-sensing data.

A Curiosity carried-out plan had quite a diversity of targets.

Curiosity Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) photo acquired on Sol 2544, October 2, 2019.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

“Having analyzed enough of the nearby bedrock, our attention has turned to white vein materials,” Wiens explains. For example, a recently taken Remote Micro-Imaging (RMI) photo shows Sol 2533 target “Glen Lyon,” which has some white material in the veins in the bedrock, he points out.

Curiosity’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) is targeting a wide white vein in today’s plan, called “Bighouse.” Another type of target, pebbles.

“For those, ChemCam has a target at 2.3 meters called “Sliddery” using a 3×3 raster. ChemCam will add another row of RMI images (“Stony Side 2”) to a mosaic of a ridge located 180 meters from the rover,” Wiens adds.

Curiosity NAV RIGHT B image acquired on Sol 2544, October 2, 2019.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The rover’s Mastcam was slated to take documentation images of the ChemCam targets, and the Hazcams will take images of the near-rover field of view.

Curiosity NAV RIGHT B image acquired on Sol 2544, October 2, 2019.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Environmental measurements

The second day of the plan had several environmental measurements, including a Mastcam crater rim extinction and a Sun tau, that is tracking the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere using a measurement of opacity called “tau.” The lower the tau, the clearer the air.

Curiosity NAV RIGHT B image acquired on Sol 2544, October 2, 2019.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Navcam will take a dust devil survey, a suprahorizon movie, a sky survey, and a zenith movie. There is also a DAN (Dynamic Albedo Of Neutrons) active observations, along with the robot’s RAD (Radiation Assessment Detector) and REMS (Rover Environmental Monitoring Station) taking data.